Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Ethereal Error

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 18:43:49 -0800

On Dec 1, 2003, at 12:59 PM, Nesmith, Kevin (US - Chicago) wrote:

I am getting an error when capturing packets in promiscuous mode. The capture screen keeps showing captured packets but ethereal aborts with the following message:
 
Glib-ERROR **:gmem,c140;fail to allocate 4294967293 bytes aborting
 
Runtime Error
Program:C:\program Files\Ethereal\ethereal.exe
 
I am running under XP and have captured packets for the last two weeks in promiscuous mode successfully. I'm using dedicated laptops and have not made any changes. I also loaded the same version 0.9.16 on another laptop and got the same error. I am capturing from a network segment which was successful a week ago. I don't know why it is aborting now.

There's probably a bug in some protocol dissector in Ethereal; a week ago, you probably either didn't have traffic for that protocol a week ago, or the traffic didn't have packets of the particular sort that triggered that bug.

Without either a stack trace (you'd need Microsoft Visual C++ to get one, and I don't know what you'd have to do to get a stack trace) or a copy of the capture causing the crash, there's not much more I can do to figure out where the bug is. There's probably a capture file with a name beginning with "ether" somewhere in your "profile" directory - I'd suggest using whatever the Windows XP menu item is for popping up the "find files" utility, and searching for files whose names match "ether*".